Recruiting Intelligence

Chaos is costly. Clarity is half off.

This truth brought to you by The Economist’s latest flash sale. Sometimes an ad sums up a vibe so neatly. Maybe the ad just caught us at the right moment. (Um, thanks Meta?)

Whether it was the morning coffee or the marketing kitsch, The Economist's attempt to get us to subscribe (we already do) served as a good reminder of the cost of chaos.

Pick your tumult: visa whack-a-mole, Duration of Status policy threats, internal budget cuts, NSF decimation, demographic cliff, you name it. The disruptions of the past 18+ months have cost our industry its equilibrium, individuals their sanity, and certainly some enrollment.

The numbers speak loudly: 97,000 fewer student US visas were awarded last summer, driven largely by a near-monthlong freeze on visa interviews. (Canada, UK, and Australia have similar downbeats). Now, DHS may adjust the “Duration of Status” for F-1 and J-1 visa holders, replacing it with a fixed admission period of up to four years and dimming the luster on some students’ dreams of a US degree. And, if history tells us anything, it won’t be the last disruption our international student hopefuls and enrollment leaders will endure.

Despite the continued chaos, we have actual work to do. Handwringing be damned! Students still want to enroll at your institution. Time to busy your team securing the fall cohort by shoring up those leads. This is ground you know well.

Read on for insights from our team, including our latest addition to Intead, Lindsey Lopez, on what to prioritize now to bring your 2026/27 leads into focus and produce your target yield.

Read on…

How is your LinkedIn feed treating you lately? The algorithm has so finely curated mine at this point that I have a seemingly endless stream of academic news from a wide variety of “mostly” insightful posts. All good food for thought.

Mostly, I scroll and learn. Other times, I marvel at the patterns of folks trying (perhaps too hard) to get noticed. Sometimes I’m frustrated by the all-too-common story arc: take something well known and accepted as truth and call it into question. These posts often prompt reader engagement but act as just a surface-level contrarian view with little insight to truly add to the conversation. And that description is likely generous.

There are many of us in the field seeking insights to help us navigate these troubled times. Academia, the headlines seem to tell us, is under tremendous strain. True enough, and yet, a lot of those headlines end up being a whole lot of noise.

History shows us that troubled times come and go. Some institutions will fail to ride out the storm. Those that do make it to the other side sometimes prevail by what seems to be dumb luck. Others plan and adapt, giving their institution the best shot at future success. With so much noise in the system and so many distractions, planning and adapting require focus – a focus that helps you see the important signals separate from the noise. No easy task.

Two recent trips to DC for conferences (AIEA and WIEC) offered the desirable opportunity to meet with our community, maintain connections, share experiences, and noodle about what really is noise and what the truly important signals are. Really helpful, as so many in our field seem to spend a lot of time wringing their hands and falling into the rut of complaining. It’s easy to do when times are legitimately tough.

But that isn’t leadership.

And that is not planning and adapting.

Below we offer two valuable focus areas where we believe academic leaders can move the needle despite the turbulence AND two helpful resources in times like these.

Read on…

Nothing forces the drive for clarity like experiencing chaos.  

Good news in years like these, we suppose. The policy swings and shifts in student demand have tested every institution’s agility and fortitude. But for leaders paying attention, the volatility is forcing a refining of strategy and development of a sharper view of what truly drives enrollment growth. 

Churn happens in every setting. Promotions, departures, budget realignment, team and department consolidation.

Disruptive, yes, but hardly unprecedented – a common cycle typically prompted by fiscal changes and then the disruptions ripple out from there. 

And yet, change rarely feels routine. Especially at the scale we are experiencing right now.

Still, your programs need promotion, your Deans have their own priorities, and everyone knows that your important leadership chair is about to turn over (you know the one, right?).

What is an enrollment team to do? Do you launch a new marketing campaign now, or wait? What if today’s A, B, and C priorities become tomorrow’s D, E, and F because the new leader coming in 4 or 5 months will have their own ideas.

And what happens in the meantime as you try to sort it all out? Stasis.  

So often, teams sit on their hard-won budgets, waiting for stability and clarity. An approach, for sure, but not a good one. Doing nothing isn’t leadership (too blunt?) – and doing nothing will do nothing to advance your yield or deliver your next class.

We all know there are legitimate excuses for not hitting your numbers. Yet we see this stasis mode all the time. And yet...

What your enrollment team needs in times of ambiguity: smart bets and clarity. 

The never-ending quest for content that helps you move the needle. This year that means a serious focus on ideas and tools your enrollment team can use to adapt to the opportunities out there and reach enrollment goals. The pressure our clients and so many others are under right now feels daunting, to say the least. Our goal: help keep them (and you) focused on effective recruitment and retention.  

In troubled times, we do not sit on our hands. There are always actions we can take despite the challenges that throw us off our original game plan. 

During a recent staff meeting, it occurred to us: over the past 15 years the Intead team has given more than 100 conference presentations. That’s a lot of higher edu conferences! And if there’s one theme that runs through them all, it’s change. 

(We like to think another theme running through them all is innovative use of data leading to valuable enrollment insights, but those of you who have been in the sessions can be the judge of that).

Five years ago, Covid “changed everything.” Mask mandates and travel restrictions arrived so suddenly, they still feel within uncomfortable reach. While those disruptions have mostly passed –  some effects stuck. Think: hybrid work, remote classes.  

And yet, at a NAFSA session on enrollment marketing earlier this year, when a fellow attendee remarked with dismay, “My school is doing all the same things we did before Covid. But everything has changed…” We couldn’t help but wonder, has it? 

Are you in a position to approve funding requests from others? Or are you the one asking for funds? We have some perspective that can help you either way.

Today, we are offering up a framework for evaluating budget requests based on your ability to achieve defined goals. Just in time for budget season. It's a quick one-pager.

Here's the thing: your budget is more than the sum of its line items - an idea that’s not lost on you. After all, numbers tell stories. Like the dollars that allowed your team to meet international students at the airport. Or, ensured your first-years first connected at your well-planned international student orientation. Or, that scholarship fund that changed yield results. Real stories. Important stories. Made possible, in part, by funds allocated through strategic planning with scarce financial resources. 

Because, where you allocate funds represents what you find most important. In other words: your budget is an expression of your values.

The budgeting framework we offer up today is there to help you conceptualize your budget requests with your goals clearly in mind. Your student-first goals.

Ensuring your budget holds space for these stories, these values, is so important. Because everything from your institution’s mission down to the smallest line item on your Excel spreadsheet should come back to supporting students. All this assumes you have the data that backs up those stories. We are not talking about one-offs and lovely but lonely anecdotes. 

Recently we caught up with our good friend and colleague Dr. Jill Blondin, Associate Vice Provost for Global Initiatives at Virginia Commonwealth University, who by the way was recently named SIO of the Year by IIE (Go Jill!). You may know Jill through the strategic budgeting workshop she runs along with Western Michigan University’s Dr. Paulo Zagalo-Melo, Associate Provost, and Annette Cummins, Assistant Director Global Education and Business Manager. Good news there: Jill and Paulo will be hosting a 2.0 version of their budgeting workshop all about revenue-generating strategies later this year. Watch for updates!  

The perspective Jill offered makes so much sense: “Align your budget with your strategy. Not the other way around.”  

Sage advice because as we all know too well, losing sight of our real goals is all too easy once we get deep into the budgeting weeds. We see numbers and things get tactical fast.  

This is especially true when the dollars we get aren’t the dollars we need. Or think we need. The truth is by keeping our eyes trained on creating a truly student-first experience, international recruitment and student services teams can often accomplish way more than we may at first realize when budget numbers fall flat.  

As Jill said to us, “The international office should not be the alpha and the omega of an international student’s experience.” Indeed, an international office cannot be everything to everyone. Middle ground collaboration is essential. Integrating international students into the full campus experience is the point anyway and your budget should reflect this. More on cross-campus collaboration in another post.  

For today, we offer a quick reboot of our popular “3 Essential Budget Questions: A Framework for Planning.” Use this as a guide to focus and prioritize your annual budget discussions this year.  

Our budget framework asks you to take a step back and reflect on whether your actual results are feeding your goals. This worksheet guidance is yours free for download. As you think through your budget needs and priority projects, keep in mind that you want your budget strategy to reflect your student-first approach.  

Read on to access this useful budgeting tool… 

Those of us with an entrepreneurial spirit and a global network typically see things others don’t. In the enrollment management field, the entrepreneur mindset is an asset, and yet…and yet, if only those in control of the purse understood what we understand about global markets and student motivations. 

The opportunities are there. The need is growing increasingly intense as revenue sources are threatened or declining. The Intead team shares your entrepreneurial enthusiasm and we are here to offer the insights that help you succeed. It’s one reason we connect so well with our university colleagues.   

Now, if only there were an easy way to satisfy your global entrepreneurial instinct while demonstrating recruitment success in such a way as to unequivocally justify your funding requests and get the programs you envision started and growing.  

Ben and Iliana will be at the NACAC conference presenting alongside our colleagues from AIRC on Sept 22 in Baltimore. Can we schedule a time to chat? Coffee's on us!

The simple truth: the root of successful international student recruitment lies in understanding your target markets, connecting with them, and effectively managing them over time. It has to do with simply doing the work as opposed to finding some magical online tool that suddenly produces all the enrollments you ever wanted. (Note the word magical in that last sentence).

To DO the work, you’ll need to take a deep dive into the macro- and micro-economics of what drives student mobility. Sounds more complicated than it is.  

If you’ve been following our blog, then you know we’ve been helping institutions like yours recruit international students for a very long time. Our multi-cultural marketing team, our bandwidth, and the tech systems in place bring focus and produce macro and micro level insights. Oh, and results. See case studies in our resource center here. 

Our work takes a load off our university counterparts who, like you, are being asked to over deliver while being chronically underfunded (and understaffed). We’ve seen what works and what doesn’t, including three common mistakes that will derail any international student recruitment program. Avoid these at all costs. Read on…

The non-traditional student can be anyone. To have one definition of a non-traditional learner would limit what we’re trying to achieve. And trying to reach all of them is essentially like trying to boil the ocean. – Hillary Dostal, former director of global marketing, recruitment, and enrollment initiatives at Northeastern University  

A 26-year-old who has just been laid off and seeks to complete a credential program and a 45-year-old stay-at-home mom thinking about a return to the workforce will respond to different messages communicated in different ways. These two prospects will be intrigued by selling points that speak to their own interests. They will prefer messaging written in different tones. They get their information through different channels. At their core, they have different wants, needs, concerns, and aspirations.  

Still, both are terrific prospects for your institution.  

This is part 5 in our 5-part blog series on reaching and enrolling non-traditional students. Find part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4. 

So, what to do? Get to know your individual audiences. Speak directly to them on their terms. This is how you convey truly compelling messaging. It doesn’t require separate marketing initiatives per se, but it does require audience segmentation and very specific targeted messaging and execution. 

Importantly, before you dive into the engagement piece, you’ll want to be sure that what you have on offer will help these prospective students succeed. 

This is a very insightful ebook. It underscores the importance of differentiating non-traditional students from traditional students throughout the pipeline–from marketing to student success and engagement. The section on conducting an effective marketing audit is a good conversation starter for strategic development conversations. The real-world insights make the book a unique and valuable resource.  ~ Santhana Naidu, Vice President for Marketing and Communications at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology  

Done well, market segmentation enables you to create better-targeted content and helps ensure that you are spending your resources on initiatives that are the best fit for your institution. This marketing work is simply the organization of your potential students into groups by demographic, psychological, and behavioral characteristics. Segmentation allows you to decide which group represents the biggest opportunity for your institution. And by opportunity, we mean they will find success and their investment of time and money will pay off for them. 

Make that group your target audience and create an offer that will appeal to them specifically. 

Ready to learn how? Read on. 

Growth-minded institutions are taking a long, hard look at their approach to non-traditional students. 

This is part 4 in our 5-part blog series on reaching and enrolling non-traditional students. Here are links to part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Truth is, courting and supporting non-traditional students has been part of the mix for decades. Most institutions of higher learning have embraced this broad swath of students. For some, the non-traditional market segment was part of their original focus. We think of them as “born this way.” For others, they are demonstrating market adaptability. We call these institutions “transformed.”  

 Which type is your institution? 

 Both have strengths to embrace and challenges to overcome. 

This ebook provides a very comprehensive look at non-traditional students. Many adult learners think that they are too late, too old, and will not fit in. In reality, there are more non-traditional students than traditional pursuing their education. Marketing to this audience is challenging as they are often working full-time and may lack the confidence to go back to school. This book offers real strategies that we should all consider.  ~ Dr. Richard Carter, Associate Vice President for Global Engagement at University in South Alabama 

Read on to take a closer look at these two roads to an institutional identity that embraces non-traditional students. We will consider the strengths and weaknesses associated with each route, while also offering food for thought about your own path.